Emily Feng
Emily Feng is NPR's Beijing correspondent.
Feng joined NPR in 2019. She roves around China, through its big cities and small villages, reporting on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of Beijing. Feng contributes to NPR's newsmagazines, newscasts, podcasts, and digital platforms.
Previously, Feng served as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. Based in Beijing, she covered a broad range of topics, including human rights and technology. She also began extensively reporting on the region of Xinjiang during this period, becoming the first foreign reporter to uncover that China was separating Uyghur children from their parents and sending them to state-run orphanages, and discovering that China was introducing forced labor in Xinjiang's detention camps.
Feng's reporting has also let her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands, and write about girl bands and art. She's filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine; the top of a mosque in Qinghai; and from inside a cave Chairman Mao once lived in.
Her human rights coverage has been shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards in 2018, recognized by the Amnesty Media Awards in February 2019 and won a Human Rights Press merit that May. Her radio coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in China earned her another Human Rights Press Award, was recognized by the National Headliners Award, and won a Gracie Award. She was also named a Livingston Award finalist in 2021.
Feng graduated cum laude from Duke University with a dual B.A. degree from Duke's Sanford School in Asian and Middle Eastern studies and in public policy.
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Russia has been escalating bombardments of Ukrainian cities this week — attacks Moscow says are aimed at military installations but often hit civilian targets instead. -
A gunman who killed one man and shot others exposes the complex identities of Taiwanese and Chinese people.
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A deadly shooting at a Taiwanese church in California exposes rising tensions between Taiwan and China.
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A new report from a non-profit group finds that goods imported from the Xinjiang region in China could be the result of policies that coerce the Uyghur ethnic minority into factory jobs. -
Finland and Sweden have long kept a careful balance — and neutral position — between the West and Russia. But that changed after Moscow invaded Ukraine. -
Law professor Kim Mutcherson said that while states are bound by HIPAA laws, individuals are not. This means that abortion "bounty hunters" could help punish people who seek abortions in other states. -
China's economic downturn has left thousands of migrant workers unemployed. They're pivoting to work in COVID control — and have strong concerns about how they are being treated. -
China's lockdown and quarantine policy is testing the limits of the city of 26 million. Parents were separated from kids. And there's not enough staff for the elderly residents of care centers. -
Battling its biggest COVID surge in two years, Shanghai has instituted rigorous lockdowns — again — that are frustrating residents. -
Academics based in China must apply for permission to attend online exchanges, even on topics that once were considered nonpolitical.
